All [the stories] are a joy to read as Barnes glides between forms... Each story is distinct and indelible, a tribute to the form. Above all they make you think about growing old and what, if anything, can be done about it.

Masterly...his best stories have a strong air of Maupassant about them...extraordinarily effective...a compelling series of vignettes of old age, executed with great skill

Sheer intelligence and acute observation carry the whole production...helps sustain a reader's faith in literature

His stories have a photographic clarity, a psychological realism that embraces extremes of feeling...with a deliciously wry streak

Barnes's steely wit finds best expression when inhabiting the anguished and angry... Their brilliance rather plays upon our petty furies and failures, embellishing them with self-deprecatory wryness...entrancing and curiously cheering

This new series of Central European Classics is important well beyond simply providing 'good reads'.

The Hungarian Proust

A masterly control of pace and structure, pitch-perfect capturing of voice, characterisation that has spot on credibility, human pleasure in life's satisfactions shadowed by awareness of the ways in which they can be jeopardised

MacLaverty has never written more powerfully or with greater authorial grip

This is a fine collection of short stories, sometimes brutal and shocking, but written with a sort of underground tenderness

MacLaverty's stories don't lack drama, but their effect is subtle and stealthy: they creep up on you

A master at work...richly textured, filled with vividly humorous detail

Confirms MacLaverty's status as an impressive heir of Chekhov and James Joyce

Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching.

A sobering study of how humans cope when under pressure. Lasdun's prose is undeniably sound. Ingenious sentences are strung together with ease

Short stories from a master prose miniaturist

A marvellous, masterful collection

Lasdun specialises in capturing, with unnerving insight, the split seconds in which moods and emotions turn on triggers so fine and subtle that they're barely perceptible. He nails these moments perfectly, spiking the core of the microgram of fly in the ointment and thus catching the infinitesimal moment with startling perception

James Lasdun is one of those gifted writers who seems to have avoided the attention he deserves....It's Beginning to Hurt is, in places, the best story collection I have read since Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins.

Lasdun's third collection of short stories is nothing short of a revelation... each story is raised to amazing heights by the author's incredibly incisive prose

James Lasdun, poet, novelist, short story writer and Englishman turned American émigré, offers up permutations of suppressed inner turmoil

There is something so rich and gripping in his prose that it simply elicits your attention... It's Beginning to Hurt is a collection to jump-start your imagination

A master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties

Precisely observed and chilling

Lasdun is a smart writer with an excellent sense of pace

Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Lasdun bravely identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince

Superb... punchy, exhilarating collection

Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight

Lasdun's characters from New York and the Sussex countryside create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of his prose